TPM locked out only early in the morning

I have an HP Folio 9470m ultrabook that is causing some grief with BitLocker for one of our users who routinely comes into the office at 6:00 AM. He attempts to log in using his BitLocker PIN and is notified that his password has been attempted too many times. If I try to recreate this issue when I get into the office at 8:00 AM, I am unable to do so and everything works fine. So this morning I decided to come in bright and early with him just to see this first hand. What I've confirmed is that it does in fact seem as though the TPM is in a lockout mode. BitLocker will not accept the PIN and states that a password has been attempted too many times. I am able to bypass the PIN using a recovery key and boot to Windows, but when I attempt to launch the BitLocker management console, I receive an error that "the TPM is defending against dictionary attacks and is in a time-out period".

After doing a bit of reading up on this, I've found that this error message indicates that the TPM is in lockout, and that the only way to unlock is via the TPM Administration console, or by logging onto Windows using a recovery key and leaving the computer powered on for 20 hours.

So my question is this: Why is this only happening at 6:00 AM everyday and then appears to be fine when we check things out at 8:00 AM?

Who is Participating?

Ultimately, the solution to this issue was to log on using the recovery key and leave the machine up and running until the lock cleared and then left it on for an additional 24 hours. It doesn't make much sense to me, but since doing this, we have not had any issues with TPM lockouts on this machine. Thanks for all of your input on this everyone.

First in this current state, even if you tried to go in to the BIOS and clear the TPM, that will not resolve the issue. Waiting for the time-out period to expire is the only solutionas it is defined by manufacturer. The TPM will lock out for the entire time-out period and additional attempts at resetting the lock will fail. The 6am would potentially falls within that time-out period. This MS article bring about the "anti-hammering" lockout period which I see relevance (see Method 1 and 3)

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Method 1 - "...If you repeatedly retry a personal identification number (PIN) in a short period of time, you may increase the TPM lockout period. Also, as long as the TPM is locked out, you may be unable to gain access to the computer even if you enter the correct PIN. "

Method 3 - "...Some TPM devices may not reset the lockout period after a successful logon. Instead, these devices may store unsuccessful lockout attempts. In this situation, you may receive the lockout error message if you enter one incorrect PIN. Also, the lockout period may last for increasingly longer times..."
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As for resolution, to Reset TPM Lockout would get us back to original state. See link below or even in a/m Method 1-3 . But if you do not have the TPM owner password, there is back to original state. Note that The TPM owner password is configured when you first enable BitLocker on the computer. This password differs from the TPM PIN.

It is possible that the TPM owner authorization hash value was saved to a file ending with a .tpm extension when the administrator originally took ownership of the TPM on your computer. Search your file system for a file ending with .tpm. If you printed your BitLocker recovery password, your TPM owner password may have been printed at the same time. If you cannot find your TPM owner password, you can clear the TPM and take ownership again. This should be done carefully because data encrypted with the TPM will be lost. If you are using BitLocker, make sure to suspend or turn off BitLocker before clearing the TPM....

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siskindsAuthor Commented: 2013-06-14

Thanks for the comments and suggestions guys - let me give you a little more background information.

1. I've confirmed that the TPM lockout is clearing at a later time in the day. The strange thing is that it is continually going into lockout mode at some point overnight.

2. I do have a valid .TPM owner password file which I am able to validate when the TPM is not in a locked state, but strangely, I am not able to use this file to reset a lockout at times when the TPM is actually locked. I receive an error message which suggests leaving the laptop for an unspecified amount of time until the lock clears on its own.

3. We do not have any account lockout policies defined on the domain (not that they would be related to a TPM lockout anyways) and this user did not experience any login issues prior to receiving this new hardware.

I hope this is not hardware issues as it is not norm. But it is dependent on tpm manufacturer policy..we are none the wiser. So if MS article stands, it is independent whether account lockout is configured. Nonetheless, not being able to reset or seeing recurrence of this after reset do render higher probability hw esp if other domain machine does not have this issue. I hope it is not time sync which is unlikely contributing any false positive but we are not sure of the tpm internal time clock though

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siskindsAuthor Commented: 2013-06-14

I am inclined to think that this may be hardware-related as well. Perhaps disabling BitLocker and clearing the TPM ownership back to default could resolve this... likely worth a shot if these problems persist.